Migration planning and operations for a data storage system involve coordination of a significant amount of asset reconfiguration/configuration activities and configuration migrations. Event windows used in migration planning include a collection of migration events in a particular time frame and using particular assets. An event window can contain multiple point in time snapshots. A “snapshot” is a representation of a state of a system at a particular point in time.
The use of event windows and snapshots in migration planning operations facilitates the planning of a data storage system as the system goes through different states during a set of configuration changes. It is to be understood that a data storage system may be part of a datacenter. Event windows and snapshots allow an administrator of the datacenter to update the configuration of the data storage system at multiple points in time. The ability to simulate a change to a representation of the datacenter (or data storage center) is referred to as modeling, while actually implementing a change to the datacenter is referred to as migration. For example, an administrator can model what a datacenter would look like given a proposed change to certain resources of a data storage system, while the actual implementation of the resource change would be considered a migration.
When planning a migration, known processes for making configuration changes typically require a user to manually plan configuration changes, resulting in increased time completing the planning, and a higher risk of user error for every manual step a user performs.
Event windows provide mechanisms to plan the processes for the configuration changes. However, there is a need for improvement of the event windows to automate configuration changes, so as to reduce the number of manual processes performed by a user, resulting in improved planning and migration, and a reduction in the time and errors when completing the required planning and configuration changes.